The victories were a clear rebuke of Trump’s politics, but also a referendum on the Democratic party’s own centrism that is complicit in the violence of masked men hunting immigrants, the funding of a genocide and the denial of healthcare to citizens of the world’s wealthiest country.
…Hakeem Jeffries, who is running for speaker of the House, will not commit to holding a vote on abolishing ICE. He opposes Medicare for All. He has said he will not hold Trump accountable for the human rights violations committed, portraying it as a question of “getting even” rather than achieving justice where it was denied. Chuck Schumer, who holds similar positions, has an extraordinarily low approval rating – yet plans to run for majority leader in the Senate. Electeds are questioning whether these men should hold these roles.
But the dissent must also come from us, as it has been. We need to demand an end to the fast violence of guns on our streets trained on our neighbors, bombs dropped from the sky and the slow violence of people dying because their healthcare was denied or their food stamps were cut.
We need to organize, and mobilize, to demand the multi-racial democracy we were promised – not a playground for the rich to get richer on the time and labor and lives of the poor.
I mean, a progressive here would be a centrist in most countries. So in a way, yes, trying to drag the center closer to the actual center.
Even Jon Ossof was campaigning on Universal Healthcare.
Centrists won’t stand anything that has happened under this administration, and will vote to repeal tariffs, defund the Iran war, and vote for real investigations of the corruption. If they dont, then they are with the proto fascists.
I’ve got news for you that might seem like clairvoyance.
Well then those aren’t centrists. Those are collaborators.
That’s what centrism is. The half way point between concentration camps and healthcare for all is still fascism.
Lol thinking you’ll be getting Healthcare for all. It will be socialism for the armed forces and brown shirts only.
Fuck Jeffries and Schumer, both of those fuckers are selfish assholes who just want to go back to the status quo so they can keep collecting their bribes in peace.
All centrism is is political cowardice. Just spend some research and pick a side.
They will, the status quo is what got us Trump in the first place. Look at all the progressives who ran. They crushed it. Centrists don’t have the popularity to draw voters. All the progress gained will be lost because the DNC will squander it with infighting and will try to prop up an unpopular candidate like Hillary.
When the overton window is skewed so far to the right like it is in the USA, what passes for centerism is still way off towards the right wing.
South Carolina won a D senate seat with a moderate
The ‘moderate’ running on Bernie’s exact platform down to every single word spoken?
Not sure where you’re getting that from. If , for example, Annie Andrews supports Medicaid For All /single-payer this is not mentioned on her campaign website or in any of the TV ads I’ve seen. She does explicitly suppoort a lot of healthcare reform that does not involve single_payer/medicare_for_all
https://drannieandrews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Patients-and-Prices-Platform.pdf
It did in Kansas, at least W/R/T the senate seat.
That being said, Hamilton doesn’t take AIPAC money and is anti-Schumer.
Of course not. Centrists kept telling people to not even vote.
AIPAC WON
I think AIPAC and Israel are in their death throes
Israel isn’t going anywhere. Bibi’s regime maybe but there’s nothing indicating that the state itself is in jeopardy.
It’s beautiful to see people finally waking up to their terroristic state.
Still a long way to go, but we are on the right path and it is righteous.
Not until they’re out of funds.
Does it ever?
It did for Bill Clinton and they’ve been chasing that high for decades. Both bribes and Blue No Matter Who votes! 🤤
Wait, does centrism ever win an election? Thinking back on both Republican and Democrat victories, it seems catering to the moderates of the other side to try and win them over never works.
It helped having a President who pissed everyone off though. Maybe with some work we can turn some of the centric Republicans to the left a bit, if we can show having power to the left means results. It isn’t over, it hasn’t even started yet.
Wait, does centrism ever win an election?
It can in countries with an actual political spectrum and multiple parties spread across all points of that spectrum.
Less so in a country with only a binary choice like the USA has.
It doesn’t work but they pretend it does because that way the donors get what they want and they get to “appear” to be trying, when in fact they’re not. Covert Republicans and controlled opposition.
Wait, does centrism ever win an election?
You could argue this happened in 1992, and it would also be the last time centrism won an election. In 1992, Democrats had basically given up on the political hegemony that had defined them since WW2, and accepted the political hegemony of neoliberalism and Ronald Reagan. And they won on it. It won an election for them.
And since that time, Democrats have been convinced that they had to run to the center to get “moderate” voters, when in reality, “centrist”/“moderate” voters never actually manifested. It was a middling black-swan event, but what it did, is it gave corporate democrats a hall pass to permanently assume a thing about a thing that didnʻt exist or even actually happen.
The very principal of a left versus right spectrum, represented as a normal distribution, is a construct of liberalism1. Its a way to represent an assumption about how voters think and behave and are distributed. And you are under no obligation to accept this construction. And when this construction has to get pushed up against reality; real actual voters with real actual data, it falls apart2. And this is because voters are messy, complicated, contradictory things. And this should be an obvious explanation because actual voters are actual people, and actual people are messy, complicated, contradictory things. A scientific materialist should faithfully reconstruct the models, push the models against the data, and reject the models which donʻt match the data. Any rational person who has borne witness to the previous decades of politics should recognize how the liberal construction of voters behave doesnʻt map to the data. It canʻt predict outcomes. There are ways of analyzing politics which do predict future states. But if you narrow your view to what assumptions liberalism demands you make, youʻll struggle to predict future state of politics, which is the ultimate test of any theory. If
You are not obligated to accept the assumptions of liberalism. And if the assumptions of liberalism dont predict beyond the data theyʻre trained on, you should reject those assumptions. You are not immediately obligated to accept other assumptions. In science, we reject theories all the time when the evidence tells us to, and sometimes that leaves us with an uncomfortable feeling of uncertainty about how that system works. But it is better to be uncertain than it is to be comfortably wrong.
1: I consider liberalism to be the parent philosophy of democratic liberalism, republican conservatism, neoliberalism, neoconservatism; all of these extension find their roots in liberalism. Two philosophies not finding their roots here are social democracy (roots in marxism), and american fascism (roots in nazism/ european fascism).
2: I can go into explaining this, but I want to keep the argument brief. The case involves multivariate analysis and stats.
S+ tier comment, in the words of my generation. I love it.
I realise why we’ve got so invested in certain framings of reality using different political lenses (conflict theory, my beloved) because it touches on literally every parts of our lives and our value systems.
But at the end of the day, it’s just a system used to organise us. I’ve seen similar tiffs arise at work over co-op versus owned, kanban versus sprints, matrix versus pyramid, and it’s the same kind of shit except for the scale: who benefits, who makes decisions, why do we do it. Real questions with concrete answers that we can experiment on and change our approaches—and keep changing them.
But just like with trying out workplace arrangements that would benefit the vast majority, there are people invested in the status quo for a variety of good and bad reasons.
We should be able to talk plainly and soberly about these things as long as we all agree that human flourishing is the ultimate goal of any system we build or reproduce.
Yeah, this is it. I appreciate the uncertain language of whether or not centrism “won” the 1992 election as well. It really is just an oversimplification where everyone but the establishment loses. The results from the last decade or so should be data enough to show that the way things are measured is fundamentally broken. While the whole left/right liberal/conservative paradigm is still the pervading “default” mode of thinking in the meta of American Politics, but it’s increasingly coming under more scrutiny, especially after this last election once again failed to produce predictions that had the results within their parameters. I think a good portion of that lies in this weird idea that many dem and even academic circles are getting recently that “populism is a right-wing thing”, which is once again predicated on the paradigm of left/right liberal/conservative. Almost like people really aren’t that simple or something…
While the whole left/right liberal/conservative paradigm …
I’m sure it is very convenient to the reigning political duopolies in the world to have people self-organise into two broad “teams.”
I’ve seen it happen in real-time, where I’ll agree with someone on 90% of the facts, but then we’re off on the last 10℅ and suddenly we consider eachother wholly on the “other side.”
Then if you’re already labeled as being on one side or the other, and you have two major politicians representing just these two broad sides with barely any room for nuance, who are you going to vote for? Some loser 3rd party isn’t on a team, and just has human opinions??
Anyway yeah
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Centrism won 2020, kinda. Exactly because of the president who pissed everyone off first
Centrism didn’t win 2020; Biden adopted a lot of Bernie’s platform and even then only won because of COVID. Trump overwhelmingly won the conversation on kitchen table issues.
Covid helped Trump by masking the effects of his economic policies. I’d say that Biden won despite Covid rather than because of it. Did you mean “because of Trump’s failure of a response to Covid”? Because that I could get behind.
Did you mean “because of Trump’s failure of a response to Covid”?
That’s my point, yes. Plenty of people voted for Biden because they wanted someone who would handle COVID like an adult, which Trump was not willing to do. Given how tight the race was it’s very likely Biden would’ve lost if he didn’t have that to campaign on.
It feels like a safe trap to fall into. Republicans have the easier task because they just cater to where people are and use fearmongering to get there. Ends justify means. But it’s nonconstructive. Blind lead the blind. To me that’s definitionally conservatism. When lost, Democrats feel they just need to be Republican-lite (or they are themselves compromised assets – like Sinema, Fetterman, Schumer, etc.).
Democrats have to actually persuade and have a vision and lead the electorate, which can be a harder task. When they have charismatic leadership who can sell this with conviction, this is when they succeed. Especially when as you point out the other side is fresh off of being exposed for the grifters they are (gas prices, etc.)
The fear mongering works because liberal centrists always fail. Democrats has just to be a real opposition that do what rhey preach and abide with international laws
There’s a superseding point. The fearmongering works because the electorate is uninformed and misinformed by megaphones of fearmongering from conservative billionaire megaphones and erosion of education and diversification of media. Yes, we should’ve stuck with FDR’s New Deal approach and his desire for a Second Bill of Rights. But the Business Plot 2 (Reagan) and 3 (Trump) won – especially with aid from foreign interference most notably Russia and Israel but possibly China too.
This makes those who try to do the right thing less palatable to the masses because Fox News & Friends is telling them that any leftist is the literal devil.
Not an easy task to overcome, but tell me a viable path for how we put a Mamdani, AES, AOC in Arkansas and Alabama and I’ll listen.
Just a note on the FDR comment - I love history, not an expert in the details, but most of FDR’s deals dried up and were discontinued because at the time it seemed their need was done. WWII made unemployment practically disappear, and much of what FDR did was to try and give jobs to everyone. A lot of the rest went away once liberal Republicans (Eisenhower) got taken into the Democrat side as Dixiecrats planned their takeover. Reagan was the first major result of that move, and it took over the country fast since businesses loved it.
If people did not notice their lives getting worse due to failure of liberal a lot of them will not fall into the propaganda that immigrants are the source of all problems. Instead of understanding the root causes and try to solve it people like prefer to complain about regular people ans whitewash the liberals failures leading to more people voting for fascism
The more progressives that respect their engagement wins , the more it will be easier to win in harder places
That didn’t stop conservatives whose lives continue to get worse voting for Republicans in Arkansas and Alabama, so I’m not understanding your point?
I’m 100% all for getting more progressives in office, fully embrace a Social Democratic Nordic Model — but I’m still not seeing this viable path to actually getting even a liberal let alone a progressive candidate on the ballot and to vote for in the likes of Arkansas and Alabama.
And are you American? I see you moderate Europe, so perhaps there is a disconnect in one’s understanding of our electoral system and the breadth, depth, and pulse of this nation and its particular states’ electoral makeup.
The electoral college is a problem for those states, but if that can be tackled, two of Alabama’s districts fell to blue this time, and one of Alabama’s got reasonably close, mostly because of urban Little Rock’s votes.
Rural is going to vote red until they realize, through years of results and through educational messaging, that Republicans aren’t going to ever help them.
Yeah I absolutely believe from here through 2028 the most progressive members of the coalition should be going to these places – kind of how AOC and Bernie reached out to rural voters in West Virginia this past cycle.
It’s the only way to make inroads and to short-circuit the onslaught of money and propaganda that comes from their televisions, social media algorithms, and churches.
My only point is that there comes a point when you must make a choice between two non-ideal candidates, and take what you will. I’m doubting these candidates had the most progressive platforms in the general election, but hey, they did elect their first open trans state legislator (I assume that’s a gerrymandered district, much how Maxwell Frost can win uncontested in FL).
Conservatives always wins after the democrats and worldwide liberals centrists fail. Look at France, le pen has big chance of being next president after Macron centrism failed and led to civil disobedience. It took
I’ve already acknowledged agreement of the problem; the question is implementation of a solution. If I could magically snap my fingers and put a Mamdani, AES, AOC, Talarico in every single seat in government, I would.
But again the forces of money and how poorly educated the electorate is means sometimes persuasion to vote for a better candidate doesn’t come in time, and then we must choose between Center-Right and Far-Right because the electorate only voted for these two choices, given the paradigm I laid out in my original comment.
Wait, does centrism ever win an election? Thinking back on both Republican and Democrat victories, it seems catering to the moderates of the other side to try and win them over never works.
Yes, centrist candidates tend to perform well in two-party systems. However, in systems with open primaries and/or two-round systems, centrist candidates can struggle to reach the final round. Indeed, US politics became much more polarized after the introduction of open primaries.
two-round systems (which are the same as open primaries) have not been implemented nearly widely enough to have such an effect, and where it is implemented it doesn’t do that because of how safe these states are for a certain party.
Not widely enough…? Two-round systems are rather common globally.
Wait, does centrism ever win an election?
You need their votes to win any election.
You can’t even get your own voters to show up (2 million Ds sat out the last Presidential election).
You need independent votes to win anything. There aren’t enough Ds or Rs (28% each). Without independent support (of which centrists are the majority, two thirds) you lose. Every time.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/fact-sheet/party-affiliation-fact-sheet-npors/
Math never lies. Partisans do
it kind of varied with region. Here in Texas both Talarico & Hinajosa are certainly more centrist in their approaches, and I don’t think open progressives could have won a Statewide elections here like they did.
Completely agree, but for anyone not in Texas you need to understand that for a lot of people here “average centrist” is basically “militant communist terrorism”.
In retrospect (and purely, only in retrospect), if we had packed the ballots with progressives they’d have gotten in anyway. I feel strongly that the election was decided here in Texas by low information voters doing the opposite of what they did last time because that’s all they could think to do. I really don’t think it went any deeper than that. The fascists knew that about their base, that’s why all their ads have always been fear based. This time, real world fear was flying in the face of the manufactured fear, and it became impossible to ignore any longer. Many of these people have never left the state. They’ve only seen six dollar diesel in memes about California. When they saw that at home it was like seeing a tiger in their kitchen. They ran for the voting booths the same way they’d run for the shotgun.
Under no circumstances would I have ever placed a bet on a statewide blue sweep! I remember Anne Richards, I feel like she’d be happy about this outcome.
I feel strongly that the election was decided here in Texas by low information voters doing the opposite of what they did last time because that’s all they could think to do.
That’s giving low-information voters too little credit. While I don’t know what exactly is going on in their heads, we do have a consistent pattern of Republicans voting for progressives (see: Obama in 2008*) so clearly there’s some amount of thought going on here. The complaints about Harris are I think also informative; some Republicans vote blue when the blue candidate seems like they’ll do stuff for them and isn’t an empty suit.
*Obama wasn’t a progressive, but he ran like one.
I think you’re on to something. The working class are so desperate for working class policies that they run towards anyone who can convince them that’s them, then when those lies are revealed, they run in the opposite direction.
I mean fucking duh. And no matter how desperately Matt Iglesias or Rahm Immanuel try and twist this, theyʻll never win another election for Democrats.
on Bill Maher show last night (a hate watch for me) they were going on about how the midterm results were specifically NOT in support of the DSA and “extreme leftist” policy and i am like, bitch, the fact that you feel the need to deny it at all is the massive win here. 🙄
This vote was against Jeffries and Schumer.
